“For the first time on the screen a strange thriller that takes you into the psychic world of plants.”

Yes, in 1979, people were talking to their plants, using biofeedback devices to hear from them and even singing to them. For everyone obsessed with the 80s, let me tell you, the 70s were way better.

Director Jonathan Sarno did post-graduate work in playwriting and directing at the Yale School of Drama under directors Arthur Penn, George Roy Hill, Elia Kazan, Roberto Rosselini and novelist Jerzy Kozinski. He’s an artist and yet here he is, making a horror movie about psychic plants, but life is great that way. Sarno wrote this, along with Lamar Sanders, and also produced the movie and acts in it.

I don’t even know where to start with this movie. I mean, the phrase Kirlian is because the photographer detective at the heart of this movie, Rilla Hart, has a photo in this style that represents the energy field of the exotic plant that her sister Laurie owned before her death. And oh yeah, her sister could literally talk to that plant.

An occult low budget movie about talking plants and a psychic named Dusty who brags about how he has surpassed human existence and is one with the plants despite mainly working the night shift loaded trucks and also knows the exact moment that they will expire? What could make this better? How about a cameo by Lawrence Tierney as a police detective? Yeah, that’ll do it.

There’s another release of this called The Plants Are Watching that cuts a fair amount of footage, so go for this one. It’s so twisty and oddball that it could pretty much be classified as an American giallo, what with its dream logic and ending which reminded me of The Cat o’ Nine Tails. It’s a relatively sexless journey through the same end of the world New York City as Driller Killer, but you know, with plants.

Honestly, this movie is way better than it has any right to be. In a perfect world, it would have been the first film that Sarno turned into a cult film and we’d be celebrating everything he made afterward instead of him going into making travel videos. There’s honestly nothing else like it.

Oh yeah, one more thing.

In the credits, it thanks the owner of Day of the Triffids for the use of a scene from that movie. That man? Philip Yordan, whose strange movie Night Train to Terror is a nexus point in my strange film obsessions. Much like how the Church of Satan connects The Car, Tippi Hedren’s Roar and Jayne Mansfield, that movie is the crux of so many of the pathways that researching weird films has led me down.

Here’s a drink for this movie.

The Plants Are Drinking

• 1 oz. Midori
• 1 oz. vodka
• 1 oz. white rum
• 5 oz. lemonade

1. Stir the first three ingredients in a glass with ice.
2. Pour lemonade over and enjoy.

Screams of a Winter Night is a regional movie inspired by regional movies. Director James L. Wilson had played Santa Claus in the Disney movie Lefty, the Dingaling Lynx before getting inspired by the movies that Charles B. Pierce (The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Legend of Boggy Creek) and Joy Houck (Creature from Black Lake) made. It has that hallmark of the regional film, a producer who was really a guy with some cash that never made a movie before, in this case, Mark Lovell, who was a real estate agent. And a local named William T. Cherry III made the special effects.

This movie does what Are You Afraid of the Dark? did for several seasons on Nickelodeon. A bunch of young people sit around a campfire telling stories, forming an effective anthology story that moves well and keeps you interested.

But man, what is really wrong with the characters in this movie? They go to John’s family’s cabin, which before that had belonged to the Durand family, who who weren’t just mysteriously killed at the cabin, they were found in pieces all over the place, possibly murdered by a demon called the Shataba. Why would you stay there after hearing this?

Made in Shreveport, Louisiana and premiering there, this movie feels like urban legends come to life, like the “Moss Point Man” that attacks a couple on lover’s lane, the “Green Light” that drives three college* fraternity kids mad and the story of a girl driven to insanity by a date rape.

The final story makes one of the girls frantic and before you know it, the wind has blows a window out and kills one of the girls before only four of the kids escape as the cabin crashes down. They run to the edge of a cliff and then they hear a howling behind them.

The Code Red release of Screams of a Winter Night includes the director’s cut of the film that runs two hours and has one more story of people being chased by a witch through a graveyard. Dimension Pictures — the people that put out Ruby, Return to Boggy Creek and Scum of the Earth — told the filmmakers that two hours was too long for the movie and that all the day-for-night footage wouldn’t show up well on drive-in screens.

This is a movie that sets up a really ominous mood from the very start. I appreciate that and love this movie because it feels like it was made by people who were excited at the prospect of creation instead of just commerce.

*This was shot at Caspari Hall, a dormitory on the campus of Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisian. Its now abandoned and said to be haunted.

Charles Berlitz’s 1974 best-seller — 20 million copies! — The Bermuda Triangle codified the belief that this area in the North Atlantic used to be Atlantis and is now the cause of so many ship and airplane disappearances.

In 1978, Rene Cardonna Jr. used this book to inspire his ridiculous and amazing epic Bermuda Triangle. And somewhere in Utah, the folks at Sunn Classics were ready.

With good old Brad Crandall in his steady role as narrator, this film follows the blueprint of the best of the Sunn Classics docs. And by that, I mean that they throw a neverending torrent of increasingly ridiculous nontruths your way until you say, “Well, yeah, Atlantis is in the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle and oh look, there’s a spaceship flying through the streets.”

Seriously, the TV commercial for this movie — with said UFO floating down a major metropolitan street — caused me to run screaming in absolute fear, hiding in my grandparent’s house in utter years until The Car came on*.

There’s a line here that Crandall reads, “The lucky ones were the ones that died.” He’s talking about the Philadelphia Experiment, which won over low budget filmmakers enough that it shows up here and in The Final Countdown and, yes, The Philadelphia Experiment.

Somewhere in this house, we have a copy of the British Man, Myth and Magic that has smelly old pages but every single one of them is filled with increasingly weirder ideas. This movie is just like that, made by producers who used a computer to try and figure out what movies that low-income families wanted to see. Well, they get me every single time.

As for Berlitz, 1975 saw the publication of Larry Kusche’s The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved, which takes Kusche to such task for errors in his reporting of missing ships that this phrase appears: “If Berlitz were to report that a boat were red, the chance of it being some other color is almost a certainty.”

*In 1979, I estimate that I watched that movie 400 times.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The follow-up to Beyond and Back, Beyond Death’s Door has our friends at Sunn Classics — or Sunn or Schick Sunn or whatever you choose to call them — taking the book by Maurice Rawlings, the parts about reincarnation and Duncan MacDougall’s 21 grams experiment from that movie and then going their own way with a narrative tale about death and redemption.

As written by Fenton Hobart Jr. and directed by perennial Sunn director Henning Scellerup, the man who is also known as adult director Hans Christian, this is a moralizing portmanteau about exactly what happens when death takes people. For some, like the stabbing victim that starts the story, they wake up, tell you what heaven looks like and dies again. And for others, like the pimp (Taurean Blacque from Hill Street Blues) it means becoming a ghost and floating over the operator table to yell, “I’m up here lookin’ down at all you cats!” There’s a skiier, a construction worker — whose ghost makes it to a disco — and one wonders if the rest of the Village People could have been in this as well.

It’s pretty amazing to watch these movies, knowing that the Utah-based Sunn was way ahead of their time. The shows that litter basic cable now all owe them so much.

Yeah, Sunn Classics for the win.

This late-in-the-game documentary for the studio — In Search of Historical Jesus and The President Must Die are the only two after this — is directed by Charles E. Sellier Jr., who produced a whole bunch of religious-themed films over his career and oh yeah directed Silent Night Deadly Night.

While the relaxing voice of Brad Crandall is presiding over this, as he does nearly all Sunn’s films, this isn’t your typical one of their films that picks a topic and then throws crackpot theories at you until you’re dizzy. No, this is a mixtape of disasters, including the crash of the Hindenburg, earthquakes, an auto race crash at LeMans in which 82 fans get killed, a hurricane, Mt. Etna erupting. a tornado, a dam collapse, the sinking of the Andrea Doria, explosions in Galveston and the Joelma building fire in Brazil, which totally goes Faces of Death and shows people leaping to their doom and uncovered bodies that have burned.

That said, the majority of this film is given to descriptions of how these issues could have been stopped. But come on, Sunn, or Sunn Classics, or Schick Sunn Classics or whatever you want to be called. We come here for theories about aliens and reincarnation. Don’t give us disasters!

You can watch this on YouTube.

Sunn Classic Pictures — also known as Sunn International Pictures, Schick Sunn Classic Pictures, and Taft International Pictures — was a Utah-based indepedent distributor of films. Its founder, Rayland Jensen began his new company under the auspices of the Schick Razor Company.

The Sunn website* is astounding. While it’s no longer active — you can check it out at the Internet Archive — it claims that Jensen developed “four walling” movies** by buying theater space, covering it with ads (all four walls, get it?) and then selling their own tickets. I’m sure Kroger Babb and all forty of his thieves would have something to say about that.

Unlike the grindhouse hucksters who sold skin, sin and violence, Sunn realized that there was exploitation money to be made from working-class families “who rarely went to the movies more than twice a year.” Sunn did their research, connecting with these families and making G rated films that they could enjoy. Or be educated by. Or at least buy tickets to.

Sunn’s films are either family fare like their series The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, paranormal and historical explorations that predate what’s on cable today like The Mysterious Monsters, The Outer Space Connection and The Lincoln Conspiracy or films that try to show the scientific reasons for God existing (this movie, Beyond and Back and In Search of Noah’s Ark).

There’s another side to the Sunn, as it were, as the Taft International Pictures version of the brand released Cujo and Hangar 18 while Jensen’s next company Jensen Farley Pictures put out The Gods Must Be Crazy, Private Lessons, The Boogens, Madman, Wacko, Joysticks, Curtains, Chained Heat, The Return of Captain Invincible and more. What a lineup!

Director Henning Schellerup has the kind of bio that we celebrate around here, because as Hans Christian he made Night Pleasures, Tomboy (not the Crown International one), Loose Times at Ridley High, Dr. Carstair’s 1869 Love-Root Elixir and Three Shades of Flesh, all while also making Sweet Jesus, Preacherman, the Sunn TV versions of The Time Machine and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and worked camera or was the cinematographer on everything from Suburban Commando, Death Race 2000, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and A Nightmare On Elm Street to Berserker, Silent Night Deadly Night, The Annihilators and Kiss of the Tarantula.

So yeah. The perfect guy*** to tell the story of the Son of God.

John Rubinstein, who would go on to play Daniel Webster on Netflix’s Sabrina and Einstein of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, plays Jesus. Another prophet — just called Prophet 1 in the credits — is Royal Dano! And there are also appearances by John Anderson (who Lincoln in Sunn’s The Lincoln Conspiracy), Annette Charles (Cha Cha from Grease), Anthony De Longis (Blade from Masters of the Universe) and actress turned conservative pundit Morgan Brittany.

Unlike the Bible, Jesus has the power to calm down tigers.

Somehow, this movie is also The Search for the Shroud of Turin at the same time, as if the folks at Sunn thought, “Is there enough story in this Jesus to last for 90 minutes?”

If there is a God and if there is a Jesus and if there is a Heaven, it’s going to be sitting here on my couch watching these Sunn docs all day and screaming at the TV.

*I mean, Reb Brown is on their board of directors.

**Sunn Classic Pictures would rent theaters for a two-week period, yet only claim they were there for a week. The initial period would clain “One Week Only” when on the seventhd ay, the one where God would have rested, Synn would say “Final Day” before changing out the marquee to read “Held Over” on Monday.

***Also, Charles E. Sellier Jr., whose IMDB bio brags that he was “founder and president of Grizzly Adams Productions, Inc., was an acclaimed producer, writer and director in the independent film industry. Sellier skillfully pioneered market testing and “four-walling”–renting a theater to show his films, thereby enabling him to keep all the profits for himself–garnered him the distinction of having more pictures in the Top 50 independent grossers than any other independent producer in the 1970s” and that Orson Welles once told him, “Young man, you are light-years ahead of the rest of the industry,” was one of the writers. Yes, the same man who directed Silent Night Deadly Night was one of the writers who wrote this. Not to be outdone, but one of the other scribes was Malvin Wald, who wrote Jess Franco’s Venus In Furs. You know what Jesus said to the Pharisees when they saw him associating with sinners. “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

José Sirgado (Eusebio Poncela, The Cannibal Man) is a frustrated horror film director who is addicted to heroin and his relationship with Ana (Cecilia Roth, who was in several Almodóvar movies). The cousin of an ex-girlfriend — someone he only met twice — sends him a package that contains a cassette, a reel of film and the key to his apartment. Those moments were integral to the man’s life, as the first time they met, José discussed film with him, watched his home movies and then sent him an interval timer so that he could explore time-lapse photography.

The second time, José had brought Ana and somehow, Pedro had a doll that belonged to her in childhood. As they listen to the tape that he’s given them, he describes how his camera started turning itself on by itself and filming him while he slept. As time goes on, red frames show up and he is not in those images. He has started to disappear overnight, but if he does not film himself, he starts to go into withdrawal. Even more interesting, those red moments of film leave him in a state of rapture.

He asked his cousin Marta — José’s ex-girlfriend — to watch him while he sleeps to see what the red moments mean. She disappears as the film turns to red.

A film about addiction made by a man who was using heroin throughout, Arrebato (Rapture) is an astounding piece of filmmaking that is rarely discussed in the U.S. Director Iván Zulueta is mainly known for his poster designs for the films of Pedro Almodóvar*, but spent most of the 80’s hidden away, dealing with his addiction, before directing some television work that feels very much like David Lynch in the best of ways.

A Spanish architect had funded this film, but the film was difficult to film and release, as it was too strange for audiences at the time. Actually, it may be too weird for them now, a meditation on the nature of being obsessed with image and working toward perfection as being the same thing as a needle in your veins.

Pedro’s footage within the movie is indicative of the style of movies that Zulueta was best known for, combining filmed images of scenery with music — think Koyaanisqatsi — filled with vast hidden meaning. As Pedro says, they are filled with “occult rhythms.”

By the end of the film, José has been invited to experience the same red addiction and gladly complies. I understand — finding the perfect movie, chasing the high of a new discovery and then worrying that there won’t be anything that magical or weird again — that’s the smack that I can’t stop injecting into my eyes and brain.

*He also dubbed one of the female voices in this movie.